The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “Fire?” Juan felt a flash of alarm. He sniffed carefully at the damp air. “ … Maybe.” Or it might just be something flowering in the night. Smells were a hard thing to search on and learn about.

  “I smell it too, William,” Miri said. “But I think things are still too wet for it to be a danger.”

  “Besides,” said Juan, “if there was fire anywhere close, we’d see the hot air in our goggles.” Maybe someone had a fire down on the beach.

  William shrugged, and sniffed at the air again. Trust the Goofus to have one superior sense—and that one useless. After a moment, he sat down beside them, but as far as Juan could tell, he still wasn’t paying attention to the pictures Juan was sending him. William reached into his bag and pulled out the FedEx mailer; the guy was still fascinated by the thing. He flexed the carton gently, then rested the box on his knees. Despite all Miri’s warnings, it looked like the Goofus wanted to knock it back into shape. He’d carefully poise one hand above the middle of the carton, as if preparing a precise poke … and then his hand would start shaking and he would have to start all over again.

  Juan looked away from him. Geez the ground was hard. And cold. He wriggled back against the rock wall and cycled through the pictures he was getting from the breadcrumbs. They were pretty uninspiring … . But sitting here quietly, not talking … there were sounds. Things that might have been insects. And behind it all, a faint, regular throbbing. Automobile traffic? Maybe. Then he realized that it was the sound of ocean surf, muffled by fog and the zigzag walls of the canyon. It was really kind of peaceful.

  There was a popping sound very nearby. Juan looked up and saw that William had done it again, smashed the mailer. Only now, it didn’t look so bent—and a little green light had replaced the warning tag.

  “You fixed it, William!” said Miri.

  William grinned. “Hah! Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better.” He was silent for a second and his shoulders slumped a little. “Well, different anyway.”

  Juan looked at the gap in the canyon walls above them. There should be enough room. “Just set it on the ground and it will fly away to Jamul,” he said.

  “No,” said William. He put the carton back in his bag.

  O-kay, so the box is cool. Have a ball, William.

  They sat listening to the surf, cycling through the video from the breadcrumbs. There were occasional changes in the pictures, quick blurs that might have been moths. Once, they saw something bigger, a glowing snout and a blurry leg.

  “I bet that was a fox,” said Miri. “But the picture was from above us. Route us more pictures from the bottom of the canyon.”

  “Right.” There was even less action down there. Maybe her movie theories were vapor, after all. He didn’t pay as much attention to the movies as most people did—and just now, he couldn’t do any background research. Dumb. On the way to the park, he had cached all sorts of stuff, but almost nothing about movie rumors.

  “Hey, a snake,” said Miri.

  The latest picture was from a breadcrumb that had landed in a bush just a few inches above the true bottom of the canyon. It was a very good viewpoint, but he didn’t see any snake. There was a pine cone and, beside it, a curved pattern in the dark sand. “Oh. A dead snake.” Viewed in thermal IR, the body was a barely visible as a change in texture. “Or maybe it’s just a shed skin.”

  “There are tracks all around it,” said Miri. “I think they’re mouse tracks.”

  Juan ran the image through some filters, and pulled up a half dozen good foot prints. He had cached pictures from nature studies. He stared at them all, transforming and correlating. “They’re mouse tracks, but they aren’t pocket mice or white foot. The prints are too big, and the angle of the digits is wrong.”

  “How can you tell?” suspicion was in her voice.

  Juan was not about to repeat his recent blunder: “I downloaded nature facts earlier,” he said truthfully, “and some fully cool analysis programs,” which was a lie.

  “Okay. So what kind of mice—”

  A new picture arrived from the breadcrumb in question.

  “Whoa!” “Wow!”

  “What is it?” said William. “I see the snake carcass now.” Apparently he was a couple of pictures behind them.

  “See, William? A mouse, right below our viewpoint—”

  “—staring straight up at us!”

  Glowing beady eyes looked into the imager.

  “I bet mice can’t see in the dark!” said Juan.

  “Well, Foxwarner has never been strong on realism.”

  Juan gave top routing priority to pics from the same breadcrumb. C’mon, c’mon! Meantime, he stared at the picture they had, analyzing. In thermal IR, the mouse’s pelt was dim red, shading in the shorter fur to orange. Who knew what it looked like in natural light? Ah, but the shape of the head looked—

  A new picture came in. Now there were three mice looking up at them. “Maybe they’re not seeing the dungball. Maybe they’re smelling the stink!”

  “Shhh!” William whispered.

  Miri leaned forward, listening. Juan pushed up his hearing and listened, too, his fists tightening. Maybe it was just his imagination: were there little scrabbling noises from below? The gleam of the breadcrumb beacon was almost thirty feet below where they were sitting.

  The breadcrumb gleam moved.

  Juan heard Miri’s quick, indrawn breath. “I think they’re shaking the bush it’s on,” she said softly.

  And the next picture they saw seemed to be from right on the ground. There was a blur of legs, and a very good head shot.

  Juan sharpened the image, and did some more comparisons. “You know what color those mice are?”

  “Of course not.”

  “White—maybe? I mean, lab mice would be neat.”

  In fact, Juan had only just saved himself. He’d been about to say: “White, of course. Their head shape matches Generic 513 lab mice.” The conclusion was based on applying conventional software to his cached nature information—but no normal person could have set up the comparisons as fast as he had just done.

  Fortunately, Miri had some distractions: The breadcrumb’s locator gleam was moving horizontally in little jerks. A new picture came up, but it was all blurred.

  “They’re rolling it along. Playing with it.”

  “Or taking it somewhere.”

  Both kids bounced to their feet, and then William stood up too. Miri forced her voice down to a whisper. “Yeah, lab mice would be neat. Escaped super-mice … . This could be a re-remake of Secret of NIMH!”

  “Those were rats in NIMH.”

  “A detail.” She was already moving down the trail. “The timing would be perfect. The copyright on the second remake just lapsed. And did you see how real those things looked? Up till a few months ago, you couldn’t make animatronics that good.”

  “Maybe they are real?” said William.

  “You mean like trained mice? Maybe. At least for parts of the show.”

  The latest picture showed cold darkness. The imaging element must be pointing into the dirt.

  They climbed down and down, trying their best not to make noise. Maybe it didn’t matter; the surf sound was much louder here. In any case, the fake mice were still rolling along their stolen breadcrumb.

  But while the three humans were moving mainly downward, the breadcrumb had moved horizontally almost fifteen feet. The pictures were coming less and less frequently. “Caray. It’s getting out of range.” Juan took three more breadcrumbs from his bag and threw them one at a time, as hard as he could. A few seconds passed, and the new crumbs registered with the net. One had landed on a ledge forward and above them. Another had fallen between the humans and the mice. The third—hah—its locator gleamed from beyond the mice. Now there were lots of good possibilities. Juan grabbed a picture off the farthest crumb. The view was looking back along the path, in the direction the mice would be coming from. Without any sense of scale, it looked like a pi
cture from some fantasy Yosemite Valley.

  They had finally reached the bottom, and could make some speed. From behind them, William said, “Watch your head, Munchkin.”

  “Oops,” said Miri, and stopped short. “We got carried away there.” This might be a big valley. for mice, but just ahead, the walls arched to within inches of each other. She bent down. “It’s wider at the bottom. I bet I could wiggle through. I know you could, Juan.”

  “Maybe,” Juan said brusquely. He pushed past her and stepped up into the cleft. He got the active probe off his back, and held it in one hand as he slid into the gap. If he stood sideways and tilted his upper body, he could fit. He didn’t even have to take off his jacket. He sidled a foot or two further, dragging the probe gun behind him. Then the passage widened enough for him to turn and walk forward.

  Miri followed a moment later. She looked up. “Huh. This is almost like a cave with a hole running along the ceiling.”

  “I don’t like this, Miriam,” said William, who was left behind; no way could he squeeze through.

  “Don’t worry, William. We’ll be careful not to get jammed.” In any real emergency, they could always punch out a call to 911.

  The two kids moved forward another fifteen feet, to where the passage narrowed again, even more than before.

  “Caray. The stolen breadcrumb is off the net.”

  “Maybe we should have just stayed up top and watched.”

  It was a little late for her to be saying that! Juan surveyed the crumb net. There was not even a hazy guesstimate on the lost node. But there were several pictures from the crumb he had tossed beyond all this: every one of them showed an empty path. “Miri! I don’t think the mice ever got to the next viewpoint.”

  “Hey, did you hear that, William? The mice have taken off down a hole somewhere.”

  “Okay, I’ll look around back here.”

  Juan and Miri moved back along the passage, looking for bolt-holes. Of course there were no shadows. The fine sand of the path was almost black, the fallen pine needles scarcely brighter. On either side, the rock walls showed dark and mottled red as the sandstone cooled in the night air. “You’d think their nest would show a glow.”

  “So they’re in deep.” Miri held up her probe gun, and slipped the radar attachment back onto the barrel. “USMC to the rescue.”

  They traversed the chamber from one narrowness to the other. When they put the GPR snout of the guns right up to the rock, the lavender echograms were much more detailed than before. There really were tunnels, mouse-sized and extending back into the rock. They went through three batteries in about five minutes, but—“But we still haven’t found an entrance!”

  “Keep looking. We know there is one.”

  “Caray, Miri! It’s just not here.”

  “You’re right.” That was William. He had crawled part way in to look at them. “Come back here. The critters jumped off the trail before it got narrow.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  William backed out, and the kids wriggled out after him. Ol’ William had been busy. He had swept the pine cones and needles away from the edges of the path. His little flashlight lay on the ground.

  But they didn’t need a flashlight to see what William had discovered. The edge of the path, which should have been black and cold, was a dim red, a redness that spread across the rock face like weird, upward-dripping blood.

  Miri dropped flat and poked around where the heat red was brightest. “Ha. I got my finger into something! Can’t find an end to it.” She pulled back … and a plume of orange followed her hand and then drifted up, its color cooling to red as it swelled and rose above them.

  There was the faint smell of burning wood.

  For a moment, they just stared at each other, the big black goggle eyes a true reflection of their inner shock.

  No more warm air rose from the hole. “We must have found an in-draft,” William said.

  Both Miri and Juan were on their knees now. They looked carefully, but the goggles didn’t have the resolution to let them see the hole clearly—it was simply a spot that glowed a bit redder than anything else.

  “Use the gun, Juan.”

  He probed the rock above the hole and on either side. The tiny passage extended two feet down from the entrance, branching several times before it reached the main network of tunnels and chambers.

  “So what happened to the dungball they grabbed? It would be nice to get some pictures from in there.”

  Juan shrugged, and fed his probe gun still another battery. “They must have it in one of the farther chambers, behind several feet of rock. The crumb doesn’t have the power to get through that.”

  Juan and Miri looked at each other, and laughed. “But we have lots more breadcrumbs!” Juan felt around for the entrance hole and rolled a crumb into it. It lit up about six inches down, just past the first tunnel branch.

  “Try another.”

  Juan studied the tunnel layout for a moment. “If I throw one in just right, I bet I can carom it a couple of feet.” The crumb’s light disappeared for a moment … and then appeared as data forwarded via the first one. Yes!

  “Still no word from the one they stole,” said Miri. There were just the two locator gleams, about six inches and thirty-six inches down their respective tunnels.

  Juan touched the gun here and there to the rock face. With the GPR at high power, he could probe through a lot of sandstone. How much could he figure out from what came back? “I think I can refine this even more,” he said. Though that would surely make Miri suspicious. “That third fork in the tunnel. Something … soft … is blocking it.” A brightly reflecting splotch, coming slowly toward them.

  “It looks like a mouse.”

  “Yeah. And it’s moving between two breadcrumbs,” effectively a two-station wireless tomograph. Maybe I can combine it all. For a moment, Juan’s whole universe was the problem of meshing the “breadcrumb tomography” with the GPR backscatter. The image showed more and more detail. He blanked out for a just a second, and for a moment after that forgot to be cautious.

  It was a mouse all right. It was facing up the tunnel, toward the entrance the three humans were watching. They could even see its guts, and the harder areas that were skull and ribs and limbs. There was something stuck in its forepaw.

  The whole thing looked like some cheap graphics trick. Too bad Miri didn’t take it that way. “Okay! I’ve had it with you, Juan! One person could never work that fast. You doormat! You let Bertie and his committee—”

  “Honest, Miri, I did this myself!” said Juan, defending where he should not defend.

  “We’re getting an F on account of you, and Bertie will own all of this!”

  William had been watching with the same detachment as during Miri’s earlier accusations. But this time: “I see the picture, Munchkin, but … I don’t think he’s lying. I think he did it himself.”

  “But—”

  William turned to Juan, “You’re on drugs, aren’t you, kid?” he said mildly.

  Once a secret is outed—

  “No!” Make the accusation look absurd. But Juan floundered, wordless.

  For an instant, Miri stared open-mouthed. And then she did something that Juan thought about a lot in the times that followed. She raised her hands, palms out, trying to silence them both.

  William smiled gently. “Miriam, don’t worry. I don’t think Foxwarner is patching us into their summer release. I don’t think anyone but us knows what we’re saying here at the bottom of a canyon in thick fog.”

  She slowly lowered her hands. “But … William.” She waved at the warmth that spread up the rock face. “None of this could be natural.”

  “But what kind of unnatural is it, Munchkin? Look at the picture your friend Juan just made. You can see the insides of the mouse. It’s not animatronic.” William ran a twitchy hand through his hair. “I think somebody in the bioscience labs hereabouts really did have an accident. Maybe these creatures are
n’t as smart as humans … but they were smart enough to escape, and fool—who was it that was poking around here in January?”

  “Feretti and Voss,” Miri said in a small voice.

  “Yes. Maybe just hiding down here when the bottom was under water was enough to fool them. I’ll bet these creatures have just a little edge over ordinary lab mice. But a little edge can be enough to change the world.”

  And Juan realized William wasn’t talking about just the mice. “I don’t want to change the world,” he said in a choked voice. “I just want to have my chance in it.”

  William nodded. “Fair enough.”

  Miri looked back and forth at them. What Juan could see of her expression was very solemn.

  Juan shrugged. “It’s okay, Miri. I think William is right. We’re all alone here.”

  She leaned a little toward him. “Was it Bertie who got you into this?”

  “Some. My mother has our family in one of the distributed framinghams. I showed my part of it to Bertie last spring, after I flunked Adaptability. Bertie shopped it around as an anonymous challenge. He came back with a custom drug. What it does—” Juan tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a rattle. “—most people would think that what it does is a joke. See,” he tapped the side of his head, “it makes my memory very very good. Everyone thinks human memory doesn’t count for much anymore. People say, ‘No need for eidetic memory when your clothes’ data storage is a billion times bigger.’ But that’s not the point. Now I can remember big data blocks perfectly, and I have my wearable put hierarchial tags on all the stuff I see. So I can communicate patterns back to my wearable just by citing a few numbers. It gives me this incredible advantage in setting up problems.”

  “So Bertie is your great friend because you are his super tool?” Her voice was quiet and outraged, but the anger was no longer directed at Juan.

  “No! I’ve studied the memory effect. The idea itself came from analysis of my own medical data. Even now that we have the gimmick, only one person in a thousand could be affected by it at all. There’s no way Bertie could have known beforehand that I was special.”